Making 'Contact' with a racy painting / THE SCENE: Actress in frilly pink likes to swing

Pink really isn't Mindy Franzese Wild's color. But when the 33-year- old slender redhead dons her blond wig, frilly dress and petticoats as well as those delicious slippers, she transforms herself into that enigmatic French girl depicted in Jean-Honore Fragonard's painting "The Swing."

And each night for about 10 minutes, Franzese Wild and her two male co- stars (Dan Sutcliffe and Keith Kuhl) bring that work to life in "Swinging," the first act of the musical "Contact," now playing at the Curran Theatre for a two-week run.

Franzese Wild hasn't seen the original painting, which hangs at the Wallace Collection in London, but once she learned she was cast, the actress made it her business to study a reproduction to help her interpret the role.

"The very first time I looked at the painting, I thought 'Oh isn't that absolutely beautiful?' " Franzese Wild says. "And then you keep looking, and the more you look, the more you start thinking about the time and the period, and you realize this is a really racy painting. There's nothing sweet and innocent about it."

Fragonard painted "The Swing" in 1767. Amid a lush and bucolic background, the smiling young woman dressed in pink is in a provocative and sexy pose as she soars on the apparatus. An aristocratic man looks up her petticoats as a servant in the background pushes the swing. Her right slipper, suspended in midair, allows the viewer to imagine its delicate flight and the frivolity of prerevolutionary France.

The real painting is only about 2 1/2 by 2 feet, but a 5-to-6 foot version stands on an easel on the Curran stage before the curtain goes up with the cast frozen into a tableau vivant of the painting.

It's a teaser of what's to come. The scene is a picnic outing that quickly becomes more and more acrobatic -- and erotic -- with the girl and the servant on the swing and ends with a witty plot twist. Practically no words are spoken (Franzese Wild's lines are "aahh" and "eeee"), and instead of the expected period music that might match the painting, the audience hears a breezy jazz version of Rodgers and Hart's "My Heart Stood Still."

"The music is so appropriate that it's not what is expected," Franzese Wild says. "Just like the story."

Franzese Wild has her theory of what life was like for the girl on the swing. "I think she's had quite an easy life," she says. "She's had time to come up with these little sex games. I envision she's very well taken care of."

Franzese Wild also muses on what the girl might be thinking behind that smile.

"There's the whole mischievous side to it," she says. "What's going on is so forbidden. I feel it's my game. I feel like I'm the one in charge. I'm going to decide when you go away, when you mount the swing. That smile has many flavors throughout the story."

When "Contact," first opened, the big sensation was the final act's modern- day "Girl in the Yellow Dress," but Franzese Wild wouldn't change her pink for yellow.

"I'm the luckiest girl in the show because I have all the fun," she says. "I can say with 'Swinging,' I always have a great time. It's genuine laughter. How wonderful is that. Anytime I look at that painting -- that beautiful girl on the swing and those gorgeous costumes -- wow, I get to do that."

With all this fun, one can only wonder the fate of the girl of the swing after the French Revolution.